What sucks, who sucks and you suck

From This Time, Unchained

2012-08-17

@stuherbert started it: “Portishead’s Dummy is 18 years old next week, and
it is still one of the most beautiful albums to listen to. What classic
albums are you listening to that are older than you might suspect?”

Dummy came out in 1996 (see, I can do mathz); I remember buying it -
from a record store (HMV - what happened to them?). But hey, I can go
further back than that: for my 18th birthday, I received the recently-released
Floodland by The Sisters of Mercy, probably one of the first
contemporary albums I owned. Around the same time, I would still have been
listening to ‘old’ albums like Foxtrot by Genesis, which came out sixteen
years previously.

Floodland is now twenty-four years old, half as much again.

Keep going like this and pretty soon you’re at the “jumpers for
goalposts” stage and grumping that “kids now don’t even know what a vinyl
record is”. (Actually, my daughter was playing happily with a vintage
Fisher Price toy record player yesterday, but then she can already use her
dad’s old record deck - she calls LPs “big CDs” and loves the Ghostbusters
theme on 45. Absolutely no interest in compact cassettes though, whereas I
would spend hours absorbing my own father’s mix tapes from his
twenties. Really weird stuff like this, which I’ve only just
discovered was by Roger Moore, or the truly wonderful Sugar Me by Lynsey de Paul.)

But the thing is, ‘old’ albums like Dummy and Floodland haven’t actually
aged. I don’t mean in the sense that they’re timeless, which is arguable
- although you wouldn’t mistake either for recent productions. I mean
that their age and the distance from their original release dates no
longer matter.

Twenty or thirty years ago, the available music was still ‘now’. What you
heard was generally what was currently being released, or had been
released in the past year or, occasionally, was a ‘classic’ track of the
sort that fills those compilation albums in the service station. Listening
to anything older was comparatively harder, unless you had an older
relative or friend who already owned the disc and happened to bring it to
your attention. You wouldn’t generally hear that stuff on the radio, let
alone see it on TV. Sure, you might be able to find it in the shop racks
(remember when WH Smith sold records, eh?) if you knew what you wanted, or
you could always ask them to order it if you had a few weeks to spare
(who did that?). That’s assuming you wanted a whole album - individual
singles were usually deleted fairly swiftly once out of the charts. But as
record store listening booths were long in the past by this time, you had
little chance of listening to it first. Oh certainly it was possible if
you made an effort, but you were unlikely to encounter it on a casual
basis. Overall, the past was a closed book.

Compare with today: the entirety of recorded musical history is happening
NOW. It’s like that Doctor Who episode with the mammoths and dinosaurs
stampeding beneath the elevated steam railways of Churchill’s
technological Roman Empire. Whatever you want to hear, whatever you
discover through blog posts and twitter mentions and ‘retro’ magazine
references, you call up instantly from Youtube or Spotify. There’s no
divider between new music being released today and ‘that stuff your
parents listened to’ - “it’s all good, man”. The MP3 charts, assuming
anyone still pays attention, which I doubt, can be the most unholy mix of
the latest X Factor singles and vintage choons that popped back on to the
radar via an ad campaign or soundtrack appearance (which used to happen
anyway, but generally required someone in a record company to spot an
opportunity and go to the trouble of sanctioning an official rerelease -
now, we just hit iTunes en masse and download). The fact that the retail
audience for music has been steadily whittled down so that it now
comprises a higher proportion of people who really love it, as opposed to
the casual consumer who’s as likely to buy a game or app, only amplifies
this effect.

No wonder contemporary acts have difficulty shifting units. They’re no
longer competing with just their peers; they’re now up against everyone
from the past too. I might buy the new Pineapple Thief album next month.
Or I might postpone it in favour of finally picking up a copy of Caravan’s
classic “In The Land Of Grey And Pink”, especially as it has a slick new
40th anniversary remastering with extra tracks - yeah, of course I’m
already familiar with it. Or I might download that track from 2007 that I
only just heard for the first time on someone’s Youtube fan montage the
other day. Sorry, Bruce.

Not surprisingly, this mélange feeds back into the creative act. A
band today are just as likely to be influenced by the Canterbury scene as
by hip-hop, and they’ll probably throw elements from both into the blender
(if they’re not quoting entire phrases anyway via samples).
Genre categorisation has become even more esoteric: “it’s a kind of
jazz/reggae/psyche thing with a soulful undercurrent and metal vocals”.
Why wouldn’t it be? Who listens to only one style or period of music now?
Contemporary is whatever pops up next on your mobile device (and note
that it took the most advanced magic to get us to this point).

“We’re all looking at a different picture
Through this new frame of mind
A thousand flowers could bloom
…For this is the beginning of forever and ever”